TEI 042: Applying User Experience Creates Products with High Value

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you episode 042 of... The Everyday Innovator with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About Our Guest: Larry Marine is a User Experience expert that has helped many companies improve their products as well as design new products. I met Larry Marine at a coffee shop - a great place for innovation. I heard him discussing product design and started talking with him about the innovation research I was doing at the time. We later co-authored chapter 5 in the PDMA Toolbook 3 titled “Integrating User Observations with Business Objectives to Drive Product Design.” Larry redesigned the user experience of ProFlowers– the website for selecting and ordering flowers. The design was different than all the other online florists at the time. The web developers actually didn’t implement the design because it didn’t “look” like the competitors. The ProFlowers leadership team had the developers implement the new design. Their sales surged and ProFlowers.com has been one of the top performing websites for conversions. The other example is a medical device that performed blood screenings. Users were complaining about its use and Larry was asked to redesign the user interface. After investigating how the machine was used in a laboratory, the actual problem was with the lack of integration between five machines. It was a manual process to move from one machine to the next, data had to be reentered, and blood samples could be mixed up. The solution was a new screening control system for the entire laboratory.